Social Media Commerce: Why Brands Should Be on Facebook

Some companies, such as Salesforce.com, have exploited the benefits and features of Facebook with gusto and have done so for years. As a result, today, they are true Facebook brand building virtuosos. They have a complete sets of inter-related, interactive Facebook pages for specific interactions with prospects and customers. Salesforce.com’s set of Facebook pages for the live-presentations of Dreamforce are a perfect case-in- point. However, Salesforce.com is a company which has adopted ‘Social’ as a middle name, and is not your average business.

For most businesses around the world, Facebook is still mostly a place where the business owner connects with his personal friends. And when lucky, he’s recently been thinking about setting up a Facebook Page for his business as well. Perhaps his sister already has made him one…

Facebook Branding 101

However, Facebook, for all businesses, not just Salesforce.com, is an incredible and incredibly inexpensive tool to build brand awareness and brand equity, to acquire new sales leads, and to build customer loyalty to generate future sales one’s amongst existing customer base. In other words, Facebook offers tremendous opportunities for brands and sales growth of any business. The only thing is, it must be worked.

I am calling this Facebook Branding 101, as it’s an introduction article to branding on Facebook. The facts and figures below are to entice and convince those businesses who not yet have a Facebook page and social media strategy, to get on with it right away and start learning Facebook marketing in more detail.

According to the infographic below (built by GetAmbassador; sourced from Wired, Econconsultancy, SmallBizTechnology, TechCrunch and Mashable), the best ‘hook’ for leads and customers to your Facebook brand is through the creation of special offers. A whopping 70% of people on Facebook says it follows specific brands on Facebook for this reason. 38% says they follow brands for shopping and/or for events.

And that ‘shopping’ does not mean ‘just browsing’ or ‘price comparison’. 25 % of people already have made a purchase via a brand’s Facebook Page.

Two-third of consumers have used Facebook to share products. Which is nearly 3x the number of people who have used either Twitter or Pinterest to share products.

Typically people do not follow a lot of brands on Facebook. Not just yet, that is. 52% of respondents follows just 2-5 different brands, whereas 35% follows 5 to 10 brands. 13% follows over 10 brands.

90 percent of all purchases are subject to social media influence. Over 1 million sites have implemented Facebook’s social layer and almost 60 percent of people have recommended a Facebook brand to friends.

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How to a Facebook Social Commerce Campaign Work?

As Facebook is such a giant media channel, when your FB social commerce campaign is done right, a business is bound to reach & influence people and improve its brand and sales volume.

What does it mean ‘done right’?"

1. Build a highly interactive Facebook fan-page.

The real value is in the Facebook follower who shares. This means that are two parts to the value of a Facebook Page: 1. the fan count and 2. the level of fan interaction with/on the Facebook page.

The more engaged fans are, the more likely they will like, comment or share content. This then in turn drives the likelihood of their friends and fans seeing that content. This increased content exposure drives sales and additional Facebook page fans and brand strength and loyalty. And so the story goes.

2. Use interesting photography to stand out and attract.

3. Use your Facebook cover as your shop window. Make it relevant to the times, the seasons and your best feature, telling your brand story. (Not that the infographic said that in this way, I say that.)

4. Make ‘Shop Now’ your second app after ‘photos’.

5. Use polls to engage.

Now, go over the infographic to see all this hang together so you can commit it to memory for when you build the Facebook Page to enable your social media commerce and marketing your brand.

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